I can just smell the rankness of the fear of strong women underneath Armey's original and Wallace and Gallagher's repetition of Armey's original "I'm glad I'm not married to you," comment. What they're really terrified of is that if they ever actually allowed someone, if they ever DARED spend their time in the company with someone who disagreed with them, they might, accidentally, totally against their very strong "macho" man-will, allow the tiniest little glimmers of actual truth and intellectual, logical, fact-based perspectives to enter their shriveled little souls.

It's the same attitude you can observe in 10-year-old boys (who are excused, to some extent by age and immaturity) out in the back yard, boasting, swearing and playing all macho and tough, all the while looking over their shoulders for mom who's likely to come storming out of the house at any moment, grab them by the ear, and haul them into their bedrooms where they will be required to stay until they are ready to apologize for using such language.

Sadly, they never grew up, but I have no doubt, since they continue to act like such naughty little boys, they also continue to be a great disappointment to their mothers.

Here's an appeal to the few progressive (or at least honestly, middle of the road) folks who have money to invest:

As the downward slide continues, those "hard-driving" conservatives (i.e. unofficial party propaganda ministers) who have bought up most of the major media outlets in the US, including the major TV networks, using massive (and now unsupportable) leverage, and used them to sell the economic/political/amoral (posing as morality) doctrines and ideologies, which are now bringing the whole system crashing down, or who at least made sure no other perspectives were ever heard; all of those good, solid, big-money, conservative folks are going to be looking to sell off their assets to get out from under the debt they used to buy them (or the bankruptcy courts will be selling them off). Prices are likely to be very reasonable.

How about we buy back the media, at fire sale prices and start giving the public better, more factual, more rational and logically-based information? Here's hoping Murdoch finds himself overextended and falls fast and hard. The day major media outlets begin to present people with a grasp of well-researched facts, rather than conservative pundits with hand-picked slightly less conservative (posing as "liberal") foils, playing he said, she said, I'll have a bit more hope for this nation.

Lacking that, every major media outlet will continue to portray whatever imagined dark side they can creatively discover (even making sh__t up in the process, after the example of Rubaugh (pronounced Rube - oh)) of Obama's successes to the extent that they will continue to do everything in their power to cause the public to lose faith and hope.

I can't help but wonder whether the massive bubble that developed and the current results of its bursting would not have been completely avoided, or at least seriously reduced if our former president and his Republican cronies would have done what every previous (and more responsible) president has done in times of war - put the nation on a wartime economy: raised taxes and/or sold bonds to pay for the war (of which not one dime has yet been paid), encouraged conservation and saving, and helped the entire nation feel involved in the war effort.

But alas he/they didn't do so. For political reasons, they attempted to make this the most invisible and painless war ever in the history of these United States to the effect that the reality and financial pain were mostly not suffered by those living during this war, and nor those politicians responsible for the ware, but by multiple generations yet to come.

In other words, as the war now winds down, we would have been positioned for a time of prosperity and growth, rather than a time of recession, perhaps depression and the need for massive government spending to rescue people from President Bush's admonition to "buy, buy, buy." This is especially ironic if you realize that Bush's provocation to buying frenzy was made with the full knowledge that the deregulation of the banking and credit industries and Wall Street's adamant opposition to increases in salaries for the poor and middle class meant all that buying was going to be done with credit under policies that would massively impoverish the general public for years to come.

Perhaps the real choice having to do with tax cuts is how far back to take their retroactive repeal. Do we go back to the beginning of the Iraq war (03/20/03), the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers (09/11/01), the inauguration of Ronald Reagan - when we really started down this destructive course (01/20/81); how far back do we go to bring the economic life of this nation back into the balance we had before the great Republican ripoff began? What foreign nations (in addition to the Cayman Islands) will the Marines need to invade in order to confiscate the records of banks where ill-gotten gains are invisibly deposited?